The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board office, in Toronto, on Sept. 28, 2021.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has promoted three executives to lead its capital markets, fund management and investment strategy divisions, filling senior roles that will report to the fund manager’s newly appointed co-chief investment officers.
Bernard Grzinic will be executive managing director of capital markets, overseeing $90-billion of assets and a team that invests in public stocks and bonds, currencies, commodities and derivatives. He was most recently the global head of credit investments for Teachers, and has worked at the pension fund manager for more than 25 years.
Steve Saldanha has been promoted to executive managing director of total fund management. In that role, he will lead a department that seeks to manage a broad array of assets, liquidity requirements and risks holistically, rather than in silos, to make the pension fund manager more effective. He has been at Teachers for 18 years and most recently led portfolio management and asset allocation.
And Robert Sturgeon, who joined Teachers in 2017, was named senior managing director of global investment strategy. His job combines responsibilities for the fund manager’s strategy to respond to global business and political trends with duties to build and nurture key relationships for the fund.
Mr. Grzinic and Mr. Saldanha succeed Gillian Brown and Stephen McLennan, who were named co-CIOs in January after previous investment chief Ziad Hindo left the organization and his job was split in two.
And Mr. Sturgeon will report to Jonathan Hausman, who was appointed to a new chief strategy officer role the same month, and who previously led global investment strategy.
Teachers chief executive officer Jo Taylor, Ms. Brown and Mr. McLennan have all noted that the fund has filled its most senior ranks with in-house talent since Mr. Hindo departed, relying mostly on long-tenured Teachers’ employees.
Teachers is preparing to announce its investment results for 2023, which will shed light on the pension fund manager’s recent performance. In the first six months of last year, the fund’s investments gained 1.9 per cent, and it managed total assets of $249.8-billion.
Some of Teachers’ large peers, such as the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System reported solid but unspectacular returns of 7.2 per cent and 4.6 per cent, respectively, in 2023, but struggled with losses on real estate investment and weaker returns from private assets, even as publicly traded stocks and bonds performed well.